Visual Arts Reviews
Constructing Worlds, Barbican Art GalleryThursday, 02 October 2014
“The minute I touched New York,” wrote Berenice Abbott, “I had a burning desire to photograph the city of incredible contrasts, the city of stone needles and skyscrapers, the city that is never the same but always changing.” Read more... |
Turner Prize 2014, Tate BritainTuesday, 30 September 2014
When did Big Ideas make a comeback at the Turner Prize? Did they ever go away? In its 30-year history it seems that everything that wasn’t painting has been labelled “conceptual art”. But we know that labels can be very misleading, and the “conceptual” in “conceptual art” obviously need not apply. Read more... |
Ming: 50 Years That Changed China, British MuseumMonday, 29 September 2014
Here be dragons, and plum blossoms in moonlight, model chariots, 15th-century paper money, weaponry and armour, embroidered robes, blue and white porcelain, vivid portraits of the court eunuchs, obese emperors and impassive empresses. There is many an unexpected subject, too: the most tenderly rendered depiction of a giraffe, a gift from the ruler of Bengal for the Imperial menagerie, with the animal dwarfing his devoted attendant. Read more... |
Constable: The Making of a Master, Victoria & Albert MuseumSaturday, 27 September 2014
This revelatory exhibition goes in search of the revolutionary magnificence which infused Constable’s compelling landscapes through an unusual prism. The narrative spine is clear. It follows Constable’s intense work playing upon as profound a knowledge of the Old Masters as was possible at the time, and reconciling it with, as he phrased it, the greatness of nature from which all originality must spring. We see nothing, he said, until we fully understand it. Read more... |
Was it right to censor Exhibit B?Wednesday, 24 September 2014
So, Exhibit B, the controversial “human zoo” using black actors to re-enact the role of ethnographic exhibits – semi-naked, chained, silenced by metal masks and degraded in metal collars – has been cancelled, due to the presence of protesters. Read more... |
Anthony Caro: The Last Sculptures, Annely JudaMonday, 22 September 2014
Late Titian, Late Rembrandt, Late Picasso, Late Matisse…. What is it with Late that seems to give some artists a Golden Age irradiated by a kind of sublime carelessness, a genuine sense of anything goes? A life spent learning means that in the end it might be worn lightly and the imagination set free. Of course, such a sublime coda is not given to all, as many an artist descends into self-parody, rather than ascending into a kind of upward free-fall. Read more... |
The Real Tudors, National Portrait GalleryFriday, 19 September 2014
For all the political hurly burly, social change and religious upheaval of the Tudor period and the intriguing personal histories of its monarchs, it is surely the portraits of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I that have done most to secure the Tudors in popular imagination. Read more... |
Jasper Johns: Regrets, Courtauld GalleryThursday, 18 September 2014
In your ninth decade it may not come as a surprise to find death staring you in the face. But it might be unnerving if you’re an artist and a menacing “death's head” skull emerges, quite unexpectedly, in an image you’ve been staring at and working from with close scrutiny for weeks and months. You might even take it, if so inclined, as a sign – if only as a sign that chance works in mysterious ways. Read more... |
Francesca Woodman: Zigzag, Victoria MiroMonday, 15 September 2014
Francesca Woodman killed herself at the age of 22, the biographical fact that colours her work and which it is de riguer to mention. She left behind paintings, it is said, as yet publicly unseen, and literally hundreds upon hundreds of negatives and 800 proofs of black and white pre-digital photography. Read more... |
British Art at War: Bomberg, Sickert and Nash, BBC FourSunday, 14 September 2014
At the end of this absorbing documentary about the art – and life – of Paul Nash we visited his tombstone in a Buckinghamshire churchyard, accompanying writer and presenter Andrew Graham-Dixon as he laid sunflowers on the grave. He reminded us that Nash saw the sunflower as a symbol for the soul, turning to the sun; indeed one of his last paintings was “Solstice of the Sunflower”. Read more... |
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